“Team members at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory share the challenges of the Curiosity Mars rover’s final minutes to landing on the surface of Mars.”
This is really going to (attempt to) happen on Aug. 5th at 10pm Pacific. Crazy.

“After 6 distinguished years, the Honourable David R. Peterson’s term as Chancellor of the University of Toronto will come to an end on June 30, 2012. Students from the Faculty of Music surprised him at his final Convocation ceremony with a flashmob tribute sung to the tune of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’.”
This is such a cool story too. (source)
Sent in by Alison G.

“The basic idea of the project is built upon the consideration of creating a moving sculpture from the recorded motion data of a real person. For our work we asked a dancer to visualize a musical piece (Kreukeltape by Machinenfabriek) as closely as possible by movements of her body.”
I am loving the artistic uses of the Kinect. Some really mind-blowing visual art is coming from this. Fantastic.

“This video is a tribute to the work of Aaron Sorkin: the recycled dialogue, recurring phrases, and familiar plot lines.”
Given that his newest show, The Newsroom, debuted on Sunday, this is semi-topical.
Sent in by several subscribers.

“This time-lapse production has been a wild and exhilarating ride, with a lot of physical work lugging my 120-130 pounds of gear around all of Manhattan. I bent (broke) some laws and made a ton of friends.”
Yes, it’s yet another time-lapse video in HD, but the challenges of getting the kinds of shots this guy got cannot be understated. Really beautifully done.

“While the visitor keeps their eyes shut, a moving platform guides a pen in their hand to draw a self-portrait, using computer vision to track their face and generate a line drawing. The result is a machine-aided drawing, a self-portrait you could never draw.”
This is on display in Brooklyn, NY at NYC Resistor, a really interesting hacker / artist collective.

“Eliezer S. Yudkowsky* wrote about an experiment which had to do with Artificial Intelligence. In a near future, man will have given birth to machines that are able to rewrite their codes, to improve themselves, and, why not, to dispense with them.”
This looks interesting.